


the stars and sea

by formerlydf



Category: Figure Skating RPF, Olympics RPF
Genre: Imported, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 21:38:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/pseuds/formerlydf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody sees anything because there's nothing there to see. There's just a new keycard in both of their hands so they don't have to bother waiting around in hallways, and a single, subtle gesture so they know whose room. [Imported from LJ, written in 2010]</p>
            </blockquote>





	the stars and sea

**Author's Note:**

> In response to [this prompt](http://wintergameskink.livejournal.com/1161.html?thread=2286985#t2286985) at [](http://wintergameskink.livejournal.com/profile)[**wintergameskink**](http://wintergameskink.livejournal.com/), which asked for a fic based on [this video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8OoETFR_mo), which I would recommend that everyone watch, because not only is it completely gorgeous, it'll probably help this fic make more sense. [Also, on a different note, lots of thanks and love to [](http://hapakitsune.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://hapakitsune.livejournal.com/)**hapakitsune** for looking this over for me. ♥]
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: Very very very not real. Title and cut from It's Beginning to Get to Me, by Snow Patrol.

They can go through the entire routine in silence, now.

Their hotels change, their programs change, their fucking coaches change. The days and months and years drop past like pages ripped out of a calendar and left to fall to the ground, drifting from side to side before finally settling, discarded.

A thousand keycards, and they know what to do, how to brush past each other and swap their spares without anybody noticing. Evan thinks: it's amazing how everybody can be looking but nobody _sees_ , but when he said this once, Johnny reminded him that they're skaters. Everyone else is supposed to pay attention to the show and ignore all the falls beforehand. It's all about what you put out there, the sparkles and spins and shine.

Johnny _would_ say that.

Evan could have started a conversation there, maybe, something about public image and media, and it could have resulted in an argument or it could have resulted in a greater sense of mutual understanding, but. He didn't. This was early on, early-ish, teenagers-early, maybe — if they ever got to be teenagers in anything but age and skating category, anyway, or if they ever stopped, because god knows they both suck at emotional maturity — but both of them know what it is they are and aren't doing.

Nobody sees anything because there's nothing there to see. There's just a new keycard in both of their hands so they don't have to bother waiting around in hallways, and a single, subtle gesture so they know whose room.

There's no scheduling, no _when_ , no _now_ , no _come back later_. They've been doing this for too long for that; there's only one time, and when the door is open there's only one bed, and two bodies, and nobody speaks if they don't have to.

It's almost, Evan thinks, as if they're trying to pretend it doesn't happen at all, and yet somehow Johnny is still the only thing in Evan's life that he can really hang on to.

-

A representative from the USFSA once asked Evan, in a frenzy of quiet desperation, how Johnny was going to react to something, whether he would flip out, if (implied strongly in her tone of voice) he would make the USFSA wish, once more, that Johnny had been born in Russia. Russia, China, France, wherever — it would be enough that Johnny was someone else's problem, the embarrassment of some other country.

Evan wonders how that would work. Would they consider Johnny real competition, then, or would he still be the butt of their jokes? Would Evan have been trumpeted so loudly without Johnny there, sparkling away and refusing to be anything they told him to?

Evan would still have been a great skater. It's a fact, and it's true; the knowledge stretches through his body, lingering in his aching joints and sore muscles, the inevitable result of long practices and suicidal training. Evan doesn't settle for being anything less than the best he can be, and the best he can be is better than everyone else. There's always someone to compete against and when there isn't, he competes against himself, against the memory of his own falls, against his tired body, against gravity.

Here is the thing about the rivalry: it pushes him, yeah, but not to the podium to accept his gold medal. Somewhere else; he's still turning himself around, trying to figure out where he's ended up.

And here is the thing about the rivalry in the eyes of the USFSA, and the ISU, and whoever watches figure skating and thinks, _But couldn't they do it with less sequins?_ : Evan would still have been a great skater, but without Johnny, he's not sure he would be figure skating's ideal of masculinity. ("Their great hetero hope," Johnny phrased it once, one of the biting, snappy comments he likes so much. Evan still isn't sure whether the sneer was for the USFSA or for Evan, or just for the world in general.) Without Johnny refusing to do as he's told and painting himself in glitter and being a beautiful, flamboyant bitch on television, what would they compare Evan to? Would they even consider him half so _manly_ without it?

"You know how he ticks, right, Evan?" the representative asked, looking like she believed _tick_ is the right word, like Johnny could go off at any second in an explosion of glitter and willful defiance, some unstable bomb of sparkling _fuck you_ 's. Maybe she's right. "What will he do?"

"No," Evan said, because it's not exactly like anyone in the USFSA has ever expected him to be eloquent. Evan doesn't like to bother with fancy words or careful phrasing. He doesn't like games, whether they're played by reporters or reps. It's easier to just stick to basics, _yes_ and _no_ and all those inspirational posters he took as pearls of wisdom when he was growing up, the ones that made his work ethic, which made him who he is. "I don't know."

"You've known him for years," the rep complained, sounding more resigned than irritated, like this was her last resort and she had never expected it to work. Evan wonders if they called anyone else before him, and who: Patti Weir? Tara? Tanith? Some other American skater who's friends with Johnny — but no, Evan can't think of anyone, not in particular. He's the one the journalists always talk about in relation to Johnny.

"Professionally," Evan said. It was almost not completely a lie. "It's Johnny."

"He goes his own way," she agreed. Evan had heard that tone of voice before, and he's heard it since, because people always seem to assume that they can say shit about Johnny to Evan and he'll take it as commiseration. _Loose cannon Johnny. If only he was more like you, Evan. Why can't he ever do what he's told? Why can't he stop being Johnny?_

"I guess," Evan said, when what he really wanted to say was, _No. That isn't what I meant at all._

-

Evan met Johnny when they were both awkward teenagers, short and gawky and strange-looking, all elbows and knees and bad haircuts and too many dreams for one lifetime, especially when they knew their bodies would give out in their late twenties (and that was if they were lucky). Johnny was something strange, someone who started skating four years after Evan and yet hadn't had to fight for it like the rest of them had, like Evan had. Figure skating is like a small town, gossipy and occasionally very close-minded; they'd all heard about the cornfield and thought, _Well_ , and then they'd heard about the axel he taught himself and thought, _Oh._ Evan's body was never like that, never easy, never meant for this, and he'd had to fight for every spin and jump and crossover, the bare inches he gained when he sacrificed his free time and his body.

That might have something to do with the difference between him and Johnny, how they skate, what they've won, but honestly, Evan doesn't even know. Johnny doesn't like neat labels or clean splits: this is where you go and this is where I go, and here is this space in between. Johnny doesn't like being told he doesn't have a good work ethic. Johnny doesn't like being told that he should work more on his technical skills instead of just making things beautiful. Johnny doesn't like Evan.

It wasn't always like this.

They might not have been friends when they were teenagers, but they liked each other enough, in that way you like someone whom you still want to beat. It was competition in the abstract, unfocused, more about scores than people. It's the same way Johnny and Stéphane used to feel about each other, before they became actual friends, the kind who smile whenever they see each other and call each other when they haven't spoken in a few weeks. Johnny and Evan went in a different direction.

Maybe it would have been easier if Johnny _had_ been born in a different country. Maybe if he and Johnny hadn't somehow seemed to divide opinions on US figure skating between the two of them—

As teens, once in a while, they'd even voluntarily spent some of their precious free time with each other and a few of the other boys their age, wandering around competition cities in groups because they weren't allowed to do it alone. They'd all been fitting into their angles back then, pushing and pulling against each other and their coaches, their parents. It's weird to think that other kids their age, normal kids who didn't miss weeks of school for competition or get up early to train or watch everything they ate, were doing the same thing, just without the added pressure of spinning through the air and landing on a single blade in the middle of a big expanse of frozen water.

At least the stupid shit regular teenagers do doesn't follow them around for the rest of their careers. Everyone seems to expect skaters to be miniature adults, when really they're just creating generations of kids who never precisely grow up, no matter how seriously they take themselves.

Rivalry is supposed to be childish, isn't it? But it's funny; it only got worse as they got older. When they were kids, they barely hated each other at all.

-

They don't talk about it, when they're in bed. (Or on the couch, or against a wall, or in the shower.) Johnny doesn't gloat or snap, doesn't rub in his victories or yell at Evan for doing better, trying to piss Evan off while punishing himself, because Johnny can be a surprisingly masochistic narcissist, someone who will only look in the mirror to watch himself bleed.

Evan doesn't bring his triumphs or losses with him, either. This isn't about scores or judges or audiences; this is about them, just another competition, albeit one with different rules. They've never talked about it, but Evan's known it all along. It's there in the covert way they swap keycards, in the way Evan keeps his body angled away from Johnny, in the sweep of Johnny's eyelids and the curve of his arms.

The minute you bring emotions into the room, you lose.

This isn't the Olympics; it doesn't come around every four years. Once you lose, you don't get another chance.

-

Evan had a friend in high school, Corbett, who was his mom's favorite of all the kids Evan knew — in retrospect, probably because he always called her ma'am and was nice to Evan's sisters and asked before he raided the fridge, which is more than Evan can say about some of his other high school friends.

Corbett played baseball, but he was also a huge sci-fi geek, someone who could spend hours rambling about robots and time travel without realizing or caring that his audience wasn't paying attention anymore. Evan mostly drifted off, but sometimes he listened. Sometimes he even remembered what it was he had listened _to_.

"Every decision we make," Corbett said one day, his hands flying through the air, slashing down with the edge of his palm as he tried to make his point, "every, every—"

"Every move we make, every step we take?" Evan asked, because he can sometimes be an asshole, and he actually does have a sense of humor, no matter what Johnny's fans say. No matter what Johnny says. It's not his fault that he gets tongue-tied sometimes: around cameras, around reporters, around Johnny.

"Shut up," Corbett said, shoving him. "But yes, jerkface. Every time you do something, there's another universe where you _didn't_ , where you did something else instead. Like — like figure skating! Like, there's some other universe where you never took up figure skating, and you were just a normal bro who beat kids up in the hallways."

"Now who's the asshole?"

"You get my point, though. You do. Right?"

Right. Evan gets the point; maybe he didn't back then, but now he does, parallel universes and butterfly wings and infinite versions of everyone he knows, in infinite combinations. There are too many ways one person's life could have gone.

Now, Evan thinks: right at this moment, in some other world, the USFSA's dreams have come true and Johnny Weir was born in another country entirely. Was born in Switzerland, and he and Lambiel grew up giggling and listening to pop music together in between competitions; was born in Russia, and has Plushenko as his main rival instead of Evan. Maybe they have the same sort of routine that Evan and Johnny have now. Maybe they don't have the routine, because Plushenko never got married and he and Johnny have something more than Evan and Johnny's unspoken agreement.

By Corbett's rules, there's a world like that out there, but Evan doesn't believe in it. Evan doesn't want to believe in it. And anyway, he doesn't think Plushenko would ever sleep with a skater who couldn't consistently land a quad.

And then, anyway, if Evan thinks about all those other countries where Johnny could have lived, he has to think about the countries on the equator where they have no figure skating to speak of, and Johnny grew up with a tan and never once put on a pair of ice skates. Evan likes that idea even less than he likes the others, because Johnny might not spend all his time on the ice but that doesn't mean he loves it any less. Evan's _seen_ ; he might never be able to understand Johnny's motivations at any given time, but he isn't blind. He's watched Johnny's programs. You can't fake that.

There's a world where Johnny chose horses over skates, and maybe that's okay. It just seems too... mean to take the ice away from Johnny, without even giving him the choice.

But there are other worlds, too, worlds where Johnny always lived in the US, and who knows what he did then. There are other possibilities for Evan, too, worlds where he never started skating or switched to hockey or gave up on figure skating after too many falls, anything that would mean he wouldn't be where he is today.

He wonders about those other hims sometimes, how they function. He wonders if the him who gave up, the slacker him — the him who never saw that inspirational poster, _quitters never win_ , or saw it and laughed it off as a cliche instead of motivation — watches figure skating on TV, watches Johnny, or if he turns the TV off because in the end, it's just a sport with an overdose of sequins. He wonders if that Johnny ever feels like something is missing.

He wonders, but he doesn't like it, because there's something wrong about the idea of not having whatever it is that he has with Johnny. Whatever it is he doesn't have. He doesn't believe in destiny, but maybe his imagination just isn't good enough for him to wrap his head around the idea of _this_ not existing.

There is a world where Evan and Johnny do more than exchange pointed barbs behind each others' backs and secretly fuck each other without exchanging a word. Evan hates that world, too.

-

Evan can't pinpoint it, no matter how hard he tries. How can he? How can anyone strip down every moment of a life to say, _here. This is where it started, this is why it started. This is the first time I avoided meeting your eyes; this is the first time you bitched about me in an interview; this is the first time we looked at each other and simultaneously turned away. Here, normal psyching out turned into me trying to piss you off, and here is where you struck back._

It's not possible. It isn't, and Evan knows because he's tried time and time again, letting their history sift through his fingers as he climbs out of Johnny's hotel bed, or watches Johnny climb out of his. He's never been entirely comfortable with emotions; they shift and fade and bloom so easily, so that everything about his internal landscape is changed when he finally has time for introspection in between working his body to exhaustion.

Someone — Evan's mom, maybe — tried once to compare emotions to athletics. "It's a progress, just like learning a new jump," she said, well-meaning but mistaken, too caught up in trying to connect it to something Evan cared about to notice Evan's frown. "Day by day, it builds up, just like how your body changes when you work out day after day."

She was wrong. Practicing implies control and direction; Evan has purpose, Evan is striving towards something. If anything, emotions are more like puberty, uncontrollable change that leaves Evan gawky and awkward, and leads to some incredibly embarrassing moments.

No. Even beyond that, it's not like skating, when at least he has Frank's external validation, and his own ratio of good practices to bad, bruises to the ache of a move completed perfectly. Learning how to do a triple axel meant paying attention to everything he was doing right, so he could do it again, and everything he was doing wrong, so he would know where he had failed. Skating separates out into angles and momentum and air, and he can watch himself progress or fall back.

Skating is clean and aware; emotions are messy and blind. This isn't how Evan learned how to do a triple axel; this is waking up one morning and realising that he can land a triple consistently, with no idea of how he got there.

If he tried, he could probably narrow down the month where the triple finally started to click, but no matter what, he can't say, _I've examined every second, every feeling, and this is it. This is when we started to hate each other._

Hate is a strong word. Then again, so is love.

-

Here's the funny thing about being around someone you don't like and nobody expects you to be polite to: it's incredibly freeing, at first.

Evan spends his entire life training, being vaguely polite to everybody he meets for the sake of his own career, mouthing platitudes at the press when they ask him about various skaters. He's the good one, the uncontroversial one, media-friendly, a role model, bland, well-trained, someone who goes along with what everyone tells him to do — spin, Evan, jump, sit, stand, shake, beg.

With Johnny, he doesn't have to. He doesn't have to _pretend_.

With Johnny, he can be just as much of a bitch as he wants, even if the two of them are usually not directly nasty to each other. He can ignore Johnny at a party, though, without fear of repercussion, can make dismissive comments about him or to him, can focus all of his attention on trying to psych Johnny out before a competition. He never realized how exhausting being polite all the time was until he finally had free rein to be an asshole.

Here's the funniest thing, though, the thing that Evan never saw coming, too busy enjoying not having to be polite: after a while, it stops being so freeing, and just starts being another thing everybody expects. If he says anything nice about Johnny — actually nice, not passive-aggressively bitchy — if he smiles at Johnny, something must be wrong.

Spin, Evan. Jump, Evan. Sit, stand, shake, beg, be nice, be good, be mean.

-

Evan rolls over to look at Johnny, letting his eyes follow the path his hands took an hour ago, skimming across Johnny's chest, his arms, his face, everything not covered by the sheet that tangles over their legs and feet. Johnny's eyes are closed; he would never let Evan do this, just sit here and look, if they were open.

Or maybe he would. Years before, someone once assumed that Evan knew how Johnny would react to anything, and Evan said _no_. No, but not for the reasons they assigned to him, not because Johnny is a wild card or determined to keep everyone on their toes or just too impetuous and uncontrolled for anybody to reasonably be able to predict his actions.

 _No,_ Evan said, because he gets occasional revelations, flashes of insight, but for the most part he never has understood Johnny and doesn't know if he ever will. Because he knows how to jump without breaking his axel and he knows what the judges want to see in a program and he knows where to touch Johnny to make him moan, but he has no idea what's ever going on in Johnny's head.

Of course, Evan thinks, Johnny can't have any idea what's going on in Evan's head, either, or he would _know_.

"What?" Johnny asks impatiently, his eyes still closed, like Evan's gaze has a physical weight.

"How are you?" Evan asks, feeling stupid and dense and inane, all those things that people call him without knowing that the words twist their way back to him, one way or another. Johnny, at least, doesn't bother to pretend that he wasn't insulting Evan five minutes ago when he was.

Evan's not stupid; he just processses things slowly, layers of awareness and understanding building up gradually. There's a difference between intelligence and cleverness, and for Evan the difference is that he has one but not the other. (Also, he forgot what a mongoose was, but it's not like figure skating and zoology have that much to do with each other, usually.)

Johnny laughs. "What? I'm fine. It's not like we haven't done this before."

They have, years of competitions and programs and hotel rooms. They have since they were still sharing rooms with their parents and had to find quiet spaces where nobody would find them. This is just another Nationals, just another post-exhibition routine, when Johnny forcibly takes a brief mid-season respite from celibacy (and god, Evan kind of hates Galina for that; Priscilla was so much nicer about sex) and Evan comes along for the ride.

"No, I meant. Just in general."

"Why?" Johnny asks bluntly, already gathering himself up. Evan thinks he can see the future, can see the trail Johnny will take as he leaves the room, and he knew this would go wrong, somehow. Somehow, it was inevitable. "Don't strain anything, Evan, I don't expect you to give a shit."

 _But I do,_ Evan wants to yell as Johnny leaves, but the words won't come out; they go the opposite way instead, sinking through his throat to drift along his veins, beating in time with his heart. _I care. I care. I care._

-

Evan lied, when he mentioned the funniest part about visible hatred. It's funny, yeah, the way everybody looks at him and expects him to react when they mention Johnny Weir. It is, even if it's funny in that way that just tires Evan out instead of making him laugh.

That's the way everything about this goes: it's funny that Evan doesn't even remember why they hate each other, and it's funny that everybody else is so involved in their relationship without knowing the half of it, and it's funny that they just keep growing farther and farther apart the longer the more they compete together, and all of those things just make Evan want to collapse on his bed and not move, another weight on his tired bones.

Another funny thing: hate isn't about disliking being near someone; it's about wanting to be in his presence just so you can piss him off, wanting him to notice that you're ignoring him. Evan used to watch Johnny's interviews just to see if Johnny ever mentioned him. When Johnny sneers at Evan or makes catty comments to reporters, it means he's thinking about Evan. When Evan doesn't just dismiss the rivalry after winning gold, it means something, because he couldn't let go of Johnny if he tried.

Here's the funniest thing about hate: it's surprisingly easy for it to turn into something else.

-

"Hey, you've reached Johnny Weir. I obviously can't answer the phone right now. If you need to reach me immediately, call my coach, Galina. If she doesn't know where I am, I've probably been kidnapped. Talk to you later! _Privet, eta_ Johnny Weir—"

Evan hangs up. Evan always hangs up. He doesn't actually want to talk to Johnny; he doesn't have anything to say. He just likes hearing his voice once in a while, like a cross-country reminder that Johnny still exists.

-

He tries to ask once, after Vancouver but before the exhibition program, since Johnny doesn't have to worry about skating. Johnny comes to Evan, since Evan has a single, but Evan wasn't expecting him tonight; he didn't want to be a six-foot-two reminder of Johnny's loss. Johnny came, though, and Evan let him in.

(The gold medal is stuffed in a drawer, but Johnny never even looked around for it.)

"What do you get out of this?" Evan breaks off from a kiss to ask, in the hopes that maybe Johnny will want sex enough that he won't leave immediately.

Johnny immediately takes a step back, and Evan stands there with his hands outstretched for a moment before letting them drop to his sides. "Why do you want to know?" he demands, because Johnny gets defensive quickly when it comes to this. It's another one of those funny things that aren't really so funny, in the end. "What the hell do I need to get out of this? It's convenient sex. I don't fuck people for — for revenge or whatever you're thinking."

It had run through Evan's mind, the idea that this is Johnny's own personal _fuck you_ to the USFSA. Maybe it is. Maybe it's a stupid question, because there are so many things Evan gets out of this that he's not sure he would be able to answer the question, if Johnny asked.

"I don't ask questions I already know the answers to," he tells Johnny, stepping forward, and Johnny lets him.

"Don't make this more than it is, Lysacek," he warns, reaching down to grab Evan's dick as if to remind him just what they're doing, what it is and what it isn't. Evan stops talking; he's good at that.

Later, though, when Johnny sits up to leave, new fingerprint-sized smudges of black and blue on his thin hips, leaving behind raised scratches on Evan's back, Evan reaches out and lays a hand on his arm. "Why don't you just stay?" he asks, hope beating an aching bruise onto his heart.

Johnny just stares at him for a moment. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you cared, Evan," he says, a strange tone in his voice. "Don't."

He doesn't come by again, no matter how long Evan stays up, waiting for the click of the lock being disengaged. Evan thinks he might have just lost.

-

"I keep on calling Johnny, but he never calls me back," Tanith said once, right after they started dating. They were sitting together in Evan's kitchen, drinking protein shakes and reading the newspaper on their separate sides of the table. Later, they would have sex.

"Really?" Evan asked, trying to shift his body to fit into Supportive Boyfriend mode. It's not entirely comfortable, but he tries. "Uh. Maybe he's busy?"

"Not this busy," Tanith told him, sighing. "I don't know. I think he's pissed at me."

"Because of me?" Evan asked, suddenly unduly interested in the answer. He started dating Tanith because he liked her, and everyone thought it would be a good idea, and a lot of times everyone else knew what Evan should do better than Evan did. Case in point: sleeping with Johnny Weir.

"I guess. Probably." She laughed abruptly, something low enough to be a chuckle without actually sounding incredibly amused. "Not that this probably matters to you."

"Hey," Evan said, reaching across the table to grab her hand, small against his palm. He tries to smooth down the rough edges sticking out of the Supportive Boyfriend shape. "He's your friend. I'm sorry."

He was. Maybe he should have been sorry, too, that he never stopped swapping keys with Johnny, but that never seemed to have anything to do with Tanith; it just was, something apart from everything else, something Evan has never had to think about, except when he starts thinking too much.

-

Somewhere in there, inside the competitions and days and years, Johnny became some sort of constant in Evan's life, always there in the back of his head. It doesn't matter how confusing he is, how he won't let Evan in, as if he can't stand the thought of Evan finding a single gap in his defenses. He's just there, so much so that Evan's developed a Johnny-voice in his mind, which silently talks back to Frank when Evan just stands there mutely, smiling behind his blank stare.

Evan doesn't understand it; it just is. It's just Johnny, and Evan always knows when he walks into a room. Just Johnny, who has the loudest personality Evan knows and uses it to hide behind, who hates the way Evan skates but also sounded sincere when he congratulated Evan after the long program. Just Johnny, the only one Evan tries to faze just before a competition.

Evan thinks: there's only so long you can spend trying to piss just one person off before that turns to wanting them to look at you, before that turns to them being one of the most important people in your life.

-

Evan goes to see Johnny after Vancouver, just knocks on his door and waits. He doesn't have a key, just a bag and as much hope as he could bear to take with him, which wasn't much.

Johnny just stares for a moment after he opens the door, blocking the entrance with his body. "What are you doing here?" he asks finally.

"I wanted to see you," Evan says, because if he's won a gold medal he doesn't think there's much he can't do, anymore. Unless it's illegal, or physically impossible, but. He can do this.

Johnny raises his eyebrows. "And now you have," he points out.

"I wanted to talk to you," Evan rephrases, and Johnny rolls his eyes.

"So you decided to fly across the country to come see me," Johnny says flatly, shifting to lean against the doorpost, like he's settling in for the long haul.

"No, I had to be here. I figured I should drop by while I was on the east coast," Evan says, because it's the truth and he's bad at lying on the spot. There's no point in lying, anyway, unless he knows what Johnny wants to hear. "I wanted to see you."

For a moment, they stand in buzzing silence, before Johnny finally steps back, like his leaning meant nothing. That figures. "You said that already," he points out, turning away and walking into the kitchen.

"I meant it."

"Apparently so." Evan sits down at the kitchen counter but Johnny still doesn't turn around, just standing and staring at a cabinet, the door slightly ajar. "So? What did you want to say?"

And the problem, really, is that Evan has no idea. Every time he tries to talk about this, to rearrange words so they make sense, so they actually connect to everything he's suddenly realizing is churning in his head, he fails. Evan thinks his communication skills are lacking, somehow.

"Could you turn around?" he asks instead, because it's going to be hard enough saying this to Johnny's face without worrying that he isn't listening. Evan's bad at reading faces; he's worse at reading backs.

Johnny sighs, aggrieved, like Evan's been complicating everything from the minute he showed up in Johnny's doorway. "Better?" he asks, spinning around and crossing his arms over his chest. "Now what?"

"You're not doing Worlds," Evan says, "and I'm doing the Dancing thing, and. You didn't come back, in Vancouver."

"So? It's not like I had some sort of obligation. It's just sex."

"I missed you," Evan finds himself saying, which, wow, was not what he meant to say at all, no matter how true it might have been. No matter that he has a box full of the card keys, Johnny's spare keys, that Evan never returned. He didn't intend to collect them; they just slipped into his bag and he didn't throw them away when he found them. It just happened.

"No," Johnny says immediately, his eyes widening, "no, this conversation is _not_ going where I think it is."

"Why not?" Evan asks, because he knew not to hope but, stupid him, he did anyway, just his heart acting without his brain's permission. "We—"

"We have sex, Evan, that's it," Johnny tells him harshly. "Just think of me as a one-night stand."

"You're _not_ ," Evan tries to protest, but Johnny's words muscle past his, fighting their way to the top.

"Look, I don't know when you swallowed a romance novel, but you can't honestly think that this — us — you can't think that we would work." Johnny stubbornly stays all the way across the kitchen, leaning against the fridge, his elbow an inch away from the toaster oven. "We don't even like each other."

It hits Evan like a punch to the stomach, but he refuses to just let it end like that. "How do you know? Nobody's even let us like each other. I'm tired of being expected to fight with you."

"Nobody tells me who I'm supposed to like," Johnny retorts, sticking his hands in his pockets before pulling them out again, making a face. "That's just you."

"I'm here, aren't I?" Evan asks.

"Yeah, and I have no idea why. It's not like you're Mr. Emotional over there." Johnny shrugs his shoulders, shifting a magnet with his upper arm. "I mean, you fucked me while you were still dating Tanith."

"Because it was you," Evan tries to explain, knowing he isn't and can't.

Johnny laughs, bitterness mixed with perplexed amusement. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"You're more important," Evan says, and Johnny says, "Shut up."

"What?"

"Just shut up, okay?" He holds up his hands like he's warding Evan off, trying to press himself farther back into the fridge. "Look, clearly, you've gone crazy or something—"

"Why?" Evan asks, like he's stuck on monosyllables, just a parrot repeating the four Ws — what? why? when where who?

"Because you don't like me!" Johnny explodes, finally throwing his hands up in the air. Evan watches them flutter down again to hang at Johnny's sides, fingers tapping against thighs. "And I don't like you. It was just sex, Evan. Sex and ten years of hating each other."

"So how many other people have you slept with?" Evan asks, words falling out of his mouth without him even thinking about them, and this isn't how he works, this isn't how he talks. He turns his words over in his head before he says anything.

"Excuse me?"

"During the off-season. How many people did you sleep with, when you weren't with me?" Evan's not sure if he wants to hear the answer, honestly; he doesn't like the idea of other people watching Johnny fall apart.

"That's not the point!" Johnny snaps, his face beginning to flush, which Evan thinks means _none_.

"So you didn't?" Evan presses, and he has no idea where he's going, but it's not like that's anything really new. "Why not?"

"Maybe I don't like sleeping with random people," Johnny challenges, taking a step forward.

"So it wasn't really like a one-night stand," Evan says, and Johnny takes a step back again.

"You're not a stranger," he points out.

"So we're not strangers, and we have good sex and we spend a lot of time together. And I like you."

"You only think you like me." Johnny crosses his arms over his chest once more, hunching into himself, his hair falling across his forehead.

"I've seen you when you've been a complete asshole to me, and I'm still here," Evan reminds him, frustration welling up in the back of his throat, spreading to his head and making it throb.

"So because we're good at being shitty to each other, we should, what, date?" Johnny demands, even though that's not what Evan said; those aren't his words, they're something Johnny twisted around, modern art out of something Evan said. "That might be the stupidest reasoning I've ever heard."

"That's not what I said," Evan protests.

"Could have fooled me," Johnny mutters, rolling his eyes.

"Couldn't we at least try?" Evan asks, and he thinks he may be getting down into pleading. It's not pretty, and it's only going to get uglier, and the smartest thing to do would just be to get out with as much of himself intact as possible. He can't, though, for several reasons involving losing. He's already lost _to_ Johnny; he doesn't want to lose Johnny altogether. "You could prove me wrong. You told me you liked that."

"I'm not a masochist," Johnny says, except Evan thinks he might have been. He's beginning to think the past several years, their thing, has just been some twisted form of mutual masochism all along, both of them pretending they were stronger than emotions when they were really just scared of them.

"What happens when we retire?" Evan asks, can't help but ask, his final and most desperate argument. "What happens when we don't see each other again? Won't you miss this?"

Johnny pauses, closes his eyes, breathes in. "I think you should leave," he says, his voice steady but his hands shaking, and Evan's feet carry him to the door without the rest of him having a choice in the matter.

-

He's spent longer than a few months without seeing Johnny — off-season, training. It just feels longer than usual when he knows that after this, nothing is going to go back to normal. No more keys, no more quietly slipping away, no more bed and walls and showers. He doesn't know if the fighting will stay.

It's only a few months, but it feels like years, or centuries. Millenia. Every so often his phone will ring for a second, but by the time he flips it open, Johnny has always hung up. It's gotten so that he tries to keep his phone on hand at all times, but even so, he can't catch him. If it weren't for the missed calls log, he would think it never happened at all. He always gets Johnny's answering machine when he calls back.

Evan dances, and he trains, and he buys more inspirational posters and puts them up around his house, just to remind him about the importance of Perseverance and Goals and Teamwork. Then he takes them down and puts them in the workout room, and then he takes them down and puts them in the guest bedroom.

Whenever he watches TV, he always avoids the Sundance Channel.

He thinks he might have been fooling himself, anyway, with the idea that this could ever happen, ever work, but he thinks it's at least better than quietly drifting apart. At least Evan had a choice, this way. At least Evan took a chance, even if it couldn't work out in this universe. The problem, he thinks, with the whole idea of parallel universes is that you know there's some other version of you out there that's happy when you aren't, and Evan isn't selfless enough to wish the other him well.

Emotions are messy and blind, but Evan can't really ignore them anymore, no matter how hard he tries, so he just tries to resign himself to the fact that it was inevitable, in the end.

-

Except.

"I'm not agreeing to try anything," Johnny insists, without preliminaries or niceties or anything Evan knows Patti instilled in him as a kid, just like Evan's mom taught him to say _please_ and _thank you_. Then again, they've always been the exception to each others' rules.

And there Johnny is on his porch, slender and pale and gripping the strap of his bag, and most definitely not the guy down the block who's starting up his own gardening business and has already come by three times to ask if Evan is interested in having his backyard redone. Evan wasn't expecting Johnny. Evan wasn't expecting any of this.

"Okay," he says slowly, because it's as good a response as anything else.

"I was just here, and I thought I would stop by," Johnny continues.

"Okay," Evan says, a little more quickly this time but still not moving from the doorway. The sun is hitting his eyes, almost silhouetting Johnny, giving him some sort of strange glow around the edges.

Johnny sighs. "God, I hate you," he tells Evan, pushing his over-sized sunglasses up to sit on the crown of his head. His voice, though, doesn't sound angry at all.

Evan can't help grinning. "I understand completely," he says, and opens the door wider to let Johnny in.


End file.
